The Yellow Marrow Doesn't Matter

BY RACHEL CRUEA

Ohio Northern University, '172016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Recipient

It’s January now and we didn’t drink enough milk. It happened so quickly; that calcified knotcaught between red and yellow marrow. I find you sleeping beneath plastic stars, feed you pills you can’t keep down. Our motherwanted to be in Campbell’s soup commercials,but her hair is turning white and yours is collectingat the bottom of a drain. She says you became a manfrom the bottom up; those fine childhoodwaves shaved away, the color so close to mine.It doesn’t matter; it’s dead no matter where it lays. I should have watched when you held a bat, your radiated frame too brittle for another inning.It should have been me. I gather baseballs forgotten over fences,unstitch white horsehide to the bone.

This gorgeous, unswerving poem holds great power in its address to an ill sibling. Never florid, never easily sentimental, this poet knows: illness is not grand. Instead, it happens “beneath plastic stars,” with hair “collecting / at the bottom of a drain.” The speaker does not try to save the sibling—that, we know, here, is hopeless. Instead, this becomes a kind of apologia: “I should have watched,” the speaker confesses. “It should have been me.” In the stunning—and heartbreaking—ending, the act of gathering baseballs becomes an act of both reparation and unmaking, unstitching the “white horsehide to the bone.” Is this not what poetry does? May all poems so unstitch the world, carry with them such weight. -Corey Van Landingham, 2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry Judge

Rachel Cruea is a student at Ohio Northern University studying Creative Writing and Literature. Originally from Findlay, Ohio, she serves as the editor-in-chief of Polaris literary magazine, and has poems previously published in Sun & Sandstone, The Vehicle, Collision, Bird’s Thumb, and forthcoming from The Pinch, Cactus Heart, and BOXCAR Poetry Review, among others.